Marc Andreessen: Will a16z Go Public & Why Labour Displacement with AI is Wrong?

I'm competing with myself. Life just gets a lot simpler if you just assume everything is your own fault. Everybody's feeling very tense and nervous and anxious and fearful, but everybody's pretending they're not feeling that way.

It has taken me 10 years, it has taken me 3,000 shows, but finally today I'm so proud to have Marc Andreessen on the show.

I think every time we've passed on a promising venture company over price, I think it's been a mistake. There's nothing that we're missing today that we could solve by going public.

The man who has built one of the greatest firms of our time. They manage over $90 billion.

The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.

And have invested in some of the most generational companies.

This entire labour displacement thing is 100% incorrect. [laughs] It's completely wrong. Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It's at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%.

This was a very special one for me, and I hope you enjoy the episode. Ready to go? [upbeat music] Marc, y-you probably don't know this, but I started this show when I was 18 years old, and you were one of three names that I wanted to have on the show back in 2015. I have to admit, I've ticked off the other two, and so I'm a bit worried that I'm gonna have to stop after doing this show.

[laughs]

But I'm so touched that you agreed to join me, so thank you for joining me.

Good. I'm thrilled to be here.

Now, I was running listening to every show that you've done before, and you recently said that you don't introspect and introspection is potentially overrated. I really struggled with this 'cause I thought we learnt from mistakes, and I valued experience in that way. Can you help me understand the lack of value placed on introspection, and do we not learn from mistakes?

Y-you know, we do learn from mistakes, uh, but the problem is learning from mistakes sometimes is good and sometimes it's bad, right? Um, and if, if we just talk business for a moment, like in the venture mindset, this is a very big problem. There's a founder version of the mistake, there's a venture version of the mistake. The founder version of the mistake is if a founder starts a company in a category and the founder doesn't work, the founder is then emotionally angry at that category for the rest of his life, um, and will not acknowledge, uh, when there's something that's gonna work in that category. Um, and I, I've just seen that like over and over and over again. Um, and, and, and that's fine 'cause most founders go on to do other things, and that's fine and good, and it, it generally doesn't damage them from a business standpoint. In venture, the same thing, [laughs] the same thing happens. If you invest in a category, or if, if you invest in a kind of company, uh, or you invest in a kind of founder, um, and it doesn't go well, it's extremely easy to learn from the mistake, right, and to basically say, "All right, I touched that hot stove. I'm never doing it again." And then, you know, y-you can tell me what happens next, right? Which is the next thing shows up and pattern matches, and it's the thing that you should invest in, and you have the chance to invest in, and... But, but you touch the scalded, scalded stove, and you know you're, you know you're learning from your mistakes, right? You're doing the responsible thing, and so you don't do it. And so I think there's something that's particularly pernicious [laughs] about learning from your mistakes in venture capital. And then I, I think that's also somewhat true about life. You get married multiple times. As they say, it's the triumph of hope over experience. Like, I think probably you want hope to triumph over experience, um, in, in that domain, and, and I think there's a lot of other domains of life in which that's probably true.